


Double or Nothing

by Decepticonsensual



Series: No More Colombian Nights (The Stanuary Fics) [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22260559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Decepticonsensual/pseuds/Decepticonsensual
Summary: Five times Stan Pines didn't give away the secret, and one time he did.  It's been one hell of a journey, through exile, marriage, divorce, heartbreak, and the loss of things Stan had and things he never had - all leading up to the biggest gamble of them all.  Written for Stanuary 2020, Week 2 - "Secret".
Relationships: Fiddleford H. McGucket/Stan Pines, Stan Pines/Original Female Character(s)
Series: No More Colombian Nights (The Stanuary Fics) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623484
Comments: 29
Kudos: 59
Collections: Stanuary





	1. High Card

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes: some VERY slight suggestiveness (nothing explicit), alcohol, and, of course, lots and lots of gambling.

“What’s the secret?”

“There’s no secret, Poindexter, you just gotta watch where my hands are goin’!” Stanley laughs as he whirls the cards around, one over the other over the other, just like he’s been watching the three-card Monte dealer on the boardwalk do.

Stanford leans in, eyes wide.

“Follow the lady,” Stanley intones, trying to deepen his ten-year-old voice to sound more like the dealer. “Keep your eye on her, gents – uh, gent – she’s a slippery one, where could she be? Is she over here? Is she over –”

“Cut it out, I can’t concentrate when you do that?”

“That’s why I’m doin’ it!”

Stanford shoots him a Look, but returns his attention to the cards, following Stanley’s every move with such a grave, all-consuming expression that Stanley is seriously tempted to lean over and tickle him, just to break him out of it. Instead, he drops the three cards into place on the floor between them and pulls his hands back with a flourish. “Okay, smart guy! Where is she?”

Stanford purses his lips and rubs his chin, and then finally points to the card on his right. Stanley flips it over to reveal the jack of clubs.

“Oooh! Bad luck! Guess you owe me a soda!”

Stanford groans. “So which one was it?”

“Uh-uh! Not telling!” Stanley grins. “You’ll just have to keep trying ’til you get it right!”

(They return to the game again and again, Stanley’s skill and his patter getting better, Stanford griping about not being able to extrapolate from incomplete data but still watching in fascination every time. He tries to graph the probability of the queen of hearts being in each of the three positions, and keeps Stanley up some nights by muttering equations, but all to no avail. Until the day their father catches them playing in the back of the pawn shop, where they’re not supposed to be, and as Stanley springs to his feet, already working on half a dozen excuses, the way he nervously rubs his arm dislodges the queen of hearts from inside his sleeve and sends her fluttering to the floor.

“It was just a _trick_?” Stanford demands afterwards. “That’s – that’s cheating!”

“Of _course_ it was a trick,” Stanley scoffs. But inside, he can’t help but shrink from the disappointment in Stanford’s eyes, like Stanford thinks his brother is just a little less magical now, and Stanley doesn’t know how to fix that.)


	2. Up the Ante

“Hey, Mister!”

Stanley Pines – all of eighteen years old, and very slowly parboiling in the wet heat of a New Jersey August – tugs uncomfortably at the collar of the cheap, shiny shirt he nevertheless had to skip a couple of meals to buy, and looks around for someone who might plausibly be a “Mister”.

“Mister! Hey!”

With a start, Stanley realises that the kid is addressing _him._ The little urchin must be, what, maybe nine? Ten? And he’s standing in front of Stanley’s gracelessly painted _Stanco. Enterprises_ stand on the boardwalk with his hands on his hips, his sunburnt stick arms covered in band-aids, with all the bravado of an admiral on the prow of a ship about to confront a rival armada.

Stanley blinks. “Yeah?”

“What’s the secret?”

“Well!” The newly-minted proprietor of _Stanco. Enterprises_ (as of the moment he nailed up the cardboard sign, as far as he’s concerned) leans forward, plastering on his best smile, and launches into his pitch. “You see, the secret is a space-age polymer that makes the Sham Total a truly -”

“No! Not _those_!” The kid waves away the shammy in Stanley’s right hand, and points instead to his left. “That! How’dya do that?”

Stanley glances down. He was getting so bored without customers that he cracked open his playing cards – not the well-thumbed deck he and Stanford had growing up, of course, but the cheap spare set that had still been kicking around his gym bag when his pa thrust it into his hands – and he’s been practicing that dumb trick he learned in middle school again. Hold the card flat in your palm; hook the fingers just so; then flick your wrist to make it “disappear” (actually just flip it over your middle knuckle so it’s held behind your hand instead), and back again to bring it back from the ether.

It’s on the tip of his tongue to explain as much to the kid. Hell, he could even teach him. But there’s something about the light in the boy’s brown eyes, like he might actually be seeing _magic_ , and Stanley can’t bring himself to do it.

Instead, he smiles – a real one, this time – and waggles his fingers. “Oh, I _could_ tell ya the secret, kid. But then, well – then the mysterious sorcerer who taught me my powers would get _angry._ He’d spot me in his crystal ball, see, givin’ away all his secrets, and he’d reach out like this -” Stanley clutches the air like he’s throttling it. “And he’d rip my guts out through my nose, from a million miles away!”

“ _Whoa.”_ The kid’s eyes are the size of dinner plates, and he looks like all his birthdays just came at once.

“And then he might put a curse on you, too! For seein’ things man was not meant to see!” Stanley makes his voice quake like the narrator in one of those radio plays Ford always liked. “Better run along, kid! Beware his wrath!”

“Wow, cooooool!” The kid goes running off, shouting his friends’ names, and Stanley can see them down the beach, pointing excitedly towards his stand. He leans back, folding his hands behind his head, unable to explain the grin on his face.

(An hour later, it turns out that the boy’s dad doesn’t find the story repeated to him as charming as his son did, and Stanley takes off down the boardwalk, clutching the prototype shammy and the cards and most of the sign, apart from a chunk that stayed stuck to the nail. What lingers in his mind, however, is the look on the kid’s face. Stanley’s long familiar with the thrill of seeing your lie believed; the moment you can tell the hook is really in ’em, his ma would say. But that’s one thing, the heady rush of knowing that your teacher isn’t going to punish you for not having the homework your non-existent dog ate, or that your brother really just bought that pancakes mature into waffles if you keep them in the fridge for long enough and you get to hold that over him _forever._ This is something more. Seeing a lie believed is exciting, but seeing a lie – a story – make someone’s eyes go wide with wonder, that starts a spreading warmth in Stanley’s chest that he doesn’t quite understand.

But he’ll remember it, many years down the line, as he stands in the wreckage of his brother’s life, under a hand-scrawled sign reading _Murder Hut,_ and watches the first visitor walk in the door.)


	3. Pair

Stan – not Stanley, so often, these days; just Stan, because it sounds tougher (and anyway, there’s no one around he needs to be told apart from anymore) – catches her watching him from across the casino floor. It’s not like the crowd isn’t full of gorgeous women, but there’s something about her smile, when their eyes meet; a shade of wickedness, like a little conspiratorial spark between the two of them. He gives her a wink.

He doesn’t really expect her to come over, but as the blackjack dealer shuffles for the next hand, Stan catches movement out of the corner of his eye and looks up to see her draping herself over the edge of the table, that infectious sparkle still in her eyes.

“Looks like you’re having quite a night,” she says, nodding to his stack of chips. “What’s your secret?”

An icy feeling trickles down the back of Stan’s neck – what he’s come to think of as the con man’s sixth sense. He cranks up the wattage on his smile. “Got myself a lucky rabbit’s foot, toots.”

“Is that so?”

“Must be,” he purrs, “since the prettiest girl in the room is talkin’ to me.”

Stan’s been kicked out of two casinos this week for counting cards, and he’d rather not make it three. And that’s the best case scenario, if she is actually working for the casino. Some of the old-school ones are still mob run, and take a lot less kindly to cheating.

The first two cards land in front of Stan, and the woman surveys them carefully, then leans in to whisper in his ear.

“I’m not security, baby, but that guy – don’t look! - that guy with the green tie at the bar, pretty sure he _is._ And he’s got his eye on you. Just so you know.” Her fingertips come up to play with his hair, nails raking through the short hairs at the back of his neck, and he shivers.

Stan smiles at the dealer lazily, trying to look as though he doesn’t have a care in the world, and deliberately loses the next hand. When he finally judges it safe enough to glance back at the bar, the man in the green tie has his eyes fixed elsewhere.

“Why tell me?” Stan asks out of the corner of his mouth.

“Call it a whim. Call it a professional courtesy.” She tucks a lock of his hair back into place almost fondly. “Or maybe I just think you’re cute.”

She sashays off without looking behind her. Stan finds losing the next hand almost too easy, distracted as he is, and he takes his diminished – but still substantial – stack of chips to cash out, figuring he’ll get out of Dodge while his luck and his kneecaps remain intact.

He runs into her in the lobby. She grins at him.

“So,” she begins, reaching up to playfully straighten his tie, “going to tell me how you were fooling the dealer?”

“Depends,” he grins back. “Gonna tell me whether that guy at the bar was actually security, or whether you just wanted to scare off the competition? ’Cause that’s what you meant, right? ‘Professional courtesy’ - one con artist to another.”

“Depends,” she returns, eyebrows arching. “Going to buy me a drink?”

(One drink turns into two, turns into four, turns into eight – turns, at some point, into Stan sprawled in a fountain, clutching a bottle of champagne they somehow liberated from a hotel bar, next to his soaking wet date who is shrieking with laughter and looking at him like he’s made of magic. It’s that look Stan finds himself chasing, the next day and the day after that.

Maybe it’s because of that that he never shows her the blackjack trick – gotta have some secrets, at least – but he teaches her one or two others, and she teaches him even more, techniques for poker and roulette and even a neat little device you can attach to a slot machine. Stan turns the tiny machine over and over, wondering whether Stanford would find it interesting, or whether he’d dismiss it as a cheap trick.

The people Stan meets through her are more dangerous than he’s used to, their schemes bigger, the stakes higher. It’s all a giddy whirlwind of glitter and risk, and Stan _loves_ it. Loves, most of all, the way she’s right there, and they can fall into each other’s arms after every victory and every narrow escape. It’s been so long since he’s had someone next to him – anyone at all, whether a lover or a friend or a br–

He doesn’t let himself finish the thought.

Six weeks later, they’re finishing off a wild night by getting married in a Vegas chapel for kicks. Her veil is a feathered headdress borrowed from a friendly showgirl and Stan has lost one of his shoes at some point when they were fleeing the cops down the Strip. In the photos, they’re a mess and they both look ecstatic.

Six months later, Stan is staring at the divorce papers the prison warden has just set in front of him. He barely hears the warden’s perfunctory expression of sympathy. He should have expected it, really; she always said she wasn’t about long-term plans, that she just wanted to enjoy the ride. And now that Stan’s ride has crashed, hard, it makes sense she’d want to get out. It’s not like she was ever going to wait. (He would have.) And hell, he never even said _I love you,_ though he did (does) (did).

He wonders if it would have changed anything. Probably not.

The chains around his wrists clink as he signs the papers.)


	4. Two Pair

“How are you doing that?”

“Hmmm?” Stan glances up from where he’s idly walking a quarter up and down his knuckles. “What, this?”

“The bit at the end. Where you make it vanish. I’ve been watchin’ you for a few minutes now, and I just can’t rightly figure it out.”

The man is small and gangly, with a mop of sandy blond hair and little round glasses, and a friendly smile that somehow seems too big for the face it’s on. There’s a gentle midwestern twang to his voice – nice voice, really. Soft. Soft, and smoother than the whiskey in Stan’s glass.

Which actually wouldn’t be hard, since Stan is drinking some bottom-shelf rotgut that feels like he’s swallowing gravel. This is the kind of whiskey that’s meant to be pounded back by the shot, preferably with your nose held, and here Stan is, sipping it like it’s some fancy imported scotch he wants to savour. The longer he drinks, the more time he’s got before the bar decides to kick him back out into the cold.

He’s irritated and not exactly looking for company, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to tell this stranger as much… but then he takes a moment and really looks the guy over. Looks at the carefully conservative button-down shirt and pants, the studied anonymity of it all. He’s wildly out of place in this gay bar in the Castro. Everything about this guy speaks of a man who’s slipped away from his respectable life (wife? Kids? Fancy job? Stan doesn’t really want to know) to come here for a few hours, and has to put on the same facade to go back to that life afterwards.

Stan meets the guy’s eyes, and thinks that this looks like someone who’d enjoy having his careful facade mussed up for once. And, somewhat to his surprise, Stan finds that he really wants to be the one doing the mussing.

He grins, broad and a little dangerous. “Is that really why you’ve been watching me for so long? Just the coin trick?” He makes the motion of tossing the quarter up in the air and catching it, then opens his palm to show that it’s disappeared. It was never actually in the air to begin with, of course, but looking at the deep blush spreading across the man’s cheeks, he’s way too distracted to notice a little sleight of hand.

“Uh, well...” The man drums long, elegant fingers against his lips, then blurts out. “To tell you the truth, you remind me awfully of someone I knew back in college. For a second, I thought you _were_ him; it’s really uncanny. But he was never – that is, he wasn’t quite as –” The man’s gaze drops and lingers on Stan’s biceps, the breadth of his shoulders.

Stan almost laughs out loud. Seriously? The old _hey, don’t I know you from somewhere_ pickup line? This guy really must not get out much. “Well, that can’t have been me,” Stan purrs, letting his eyes rake down the man’s frame, then slowly back up. “’Cause I’d definitely remember someone like you.”

If it’s possible, the man blushes even darker, and swallows hard.

Stan sticks out a hand. “I’m Hal.” _Am I?_ He’s pretty sure Hal Forrester is the driver’s license he stuck in his wallet before he hit California. Ah, well; not like most of the men in this joint are giving out their real names.

The man shakes his hand. His fingers are cool to the touch. “Fiddleford.”

Stan blinks. “Wow, you’re really new to this whole ‘fake name’ thing, aren’tcha? They’re still supposed to be, y’know, _names._ ”

The guy’s laugh is brassy and wild, and nothing like his soft voice. It’s strangely disarming. “I wish! No, you can blame my pa for that one. Old family name. They say great-great-grandpa was a Fiddleford; he was the first one to move the family out to Tennessee, back in the day. Mama says Fiddlefords are like that, always restless – and oh, my, I’m talkin’ too much again, aren’t I?”

Stan chuckles, charmed against his will. “Tell ya what, _Fiddlefor_ _d._ Buy me a drink, and you can talk all you want.”

“Well, Hal –”

“Nuh-uh. I’ve decided I’m gonna go by Banjobridge from now on.”

Fiddleford laughs again, and Stan feels a flush of triumph. “Well, I reckon I can do that. Same again?”

Stan looks at his glass and suppresses a shudder. “Nah, I’m not really feelin’ this stuff. Say, you’re from Tennessee, right? They make any good whiskey there?”

Fiddleford’s eyes flash at the challenge.

(Fiddleford is kind. They talk whiskey for a while, and music, and a little about the man’s work – a bunch of nerd stuff Ford would probably have loved that mostly goes over Stan’s head, but discussing it lights Fiddleford up and Stan is content to listen. They don’t get personal. That suits both of them.

Fiddleford is kind, and nervous, and later on he breathes Stan’s name in the dark – _Hal –_ giving it a reverence like it’s magic. And it doesn’t matter that it’s the wrong name. Stan knows he’d do anything to hear it again.

And he does.

Fiddleford is gone well before morning, but he pays in advance for the room and for Stan’s breakfast, too, and he leaves a sweet note on the pillow. It starts out, “Hey, Banjobridge.” There’s almost a page in a scientist’s careful script, thanking Stan. Stan keeps it, folded and refolded until it’s soft, tucked behind the photo of Ford and himself that he’s taped to the sun visor of the Stanmobile.

All he thinks when he meets the town kook of Gravity Falls, years later, is _huh. Must be a pretty common name after all._ )


	5. Fold

The moment Stan hears, “All right, Stanford, fess up; what’s yer secret?” his mind flies to _Ford,_ and _the portal,_ and the creeping fear he’s had for the last five years – that someone, _someone_ in Gravity Falls must have known Ford better than they’re letting on, at least well enough to spot a discrepancy in a voice or a habit or _the number of fingers on a friggin’ hand,_ and that they’ve been biding their time until Stan screws up enough to damn himself.

All he wants to do is get out of here, get to the Shack _get to the Shack get to the SHACK._ Anything to protect the only way back to his brother. His hand is halfway to the smoke bombs in his jacket pocket on sheer instinct. He forces it down.

Instead, he favours the other men around the poker table with his most sparkling smile. “Why, whatd’ya mean, fellas?”

Six pairs of eyes are narrowed suspiciously at him. The older guy across from Stan – something Sprott, wasn’t it? - pipes up again. “Well, I can’t help but notice as you’ve won yourself just about every hand we’ve played tonight.”

There’s a spike of relief, that it’s only about the card game, but it’s short lived. _Dammit._ Stan’s let himself get carried away. He’s played poker with this bunch a few times, now, and he knows that if he just paced himself, it wouldn’t have been hard to walk away from every game with just a little more than he came with. Over time, it would have added up. But his winter boots are wearing out, and the Shack is so _cold_ when he’s short of money for the heat, and it’s just so damn easy to fleece these rubes, and… and Stan Pines has screwed up. Again.

“Now, Stanford,” one of the newer additions, a big guy named Gleeful, drawls, “you wouldn’t be _cheating_ at a friendly game of cards, would you?

“What? No! That’s crazy talk, how would I even do that?” Stan puts up his hands defensively. “Just – just a weird streak of luck, that’s all. My ma always said I had the devil’s own luck.” Caryn Pines would have said no such thing about her second son, of course, who had once managed to get his head stuck in a bannister, but it does seem to mollify the other players. Their expressions soften from anger into thoughtfulness, and there are a few scattered murmurs.

“What does that mean, Pop?” Sprott’s son – a tall lad who’s following his dad into the farming business – whispers unsubtly.

“It’s simple, son,” the elder Sprott replies. He rolls up a newspaper, and matter-of-factly sets it alight like a torch. “It means he’s a witch.”

In the tense minutes that follow, Stan proceeds to talk faster than he’s ever talked in his life, and that’s saying something.

(How he convinces them to let him go, he barely remembers afterwards – only that he never quite admits to cheating, and as a result, his former poker buddies tend to regard him with suspicion when they see him after that. Eventually, the rest of the town does, too. They’re looking at him the way no one’s looked at him in a while, Stan realises. Like he’s magic. Only, in Gravity Falls, magic is a dirty, dangerous business.

Either way, it’s the end of poker night. It’s also the end of bowling night, and fishing trips, and eventually Stan more or less gives up on the idea of making friends in town. It’s just as well, really; it’s risky to let anyone too far into his life, when he needs to keep the kinds of secrets he does.

When it comes to friends, you only really need one, and it won’t be long before Stan gets his back.)


	6. Full House

“All right, pumpkin. Just remember, make sure the dealer can’t see you bend the corner of that card.”

Stan isn’t sure how, exactly, he decides to teach Mabel how to cheat at poker. It’s not all that long after she and her brother arrive at the Shack, and Stan finds himself with a long, unbroken Sunday afternoon and only the haziest idea of what modern kids do to pass the time. Dipper has already wandered back to his books, so like Ford that Stan had to turn away for a second and pretend to be coughing to hide the welling in his eyes, but Mabel stays sitting at the table, watching Stan with an expectant smile.

He only means to show her one trick – keep the kid busy and hey, maybe it’ll come in handy some day, maybe it’ll win her a soda or something – but as soon as he’s explained the basic premise, her eyes widen and she breathes, “Grunkle Stan, you’re a _genius._ ” The next thing he realises, he’s pouring out every secret he knows: blackjack, coin tricks, how to win those stuffed animal things at carnivals, what you need to keep in mind to rig a boxing match. Mabel’s expression glows brighter and brighter with each new secret. He’s not sure, at first, how much she’s even taking in. All he knows is that finding out how the tricks work isn’t dampening the wonder in her eyes at _all._ Not even when he shows her the queen of hearts up his sleeve.

(The day that Mabel chirps in the middle of their poker game, “I’ve been cheating for the last eight turns!” and Stan _didn’t notice_? That’s the day it feels like his heart is going to burst out of his chest.

“That’s my girl,” he says, and ruffles her hair, and looks at her like she’s magic.)

**Author's Note:**

> So, I wrote this to be canon-compliant, but realised afterwards that it also works as an interesting AU if you assume that Stan ACTUALLY has some kind of (unrecognised) magical ability, and perhaps that, at the end, he senses the same ability in Mabel. You can read it any way you choose; I just thought that was a cool optional add-on. :)


End file.
